If Devils goalie Cory Schnieder feels like he’s Bill Murray in Groundhog Day so do Devil fans watching this team.  Because we’ve seen games like last night over and over again.  Bad/unneccesary coaching decisions, costly mistakes, intermittent passion and an offense that couldn’t hit a float in the Macy’s Day Thanksgiving Parade with a bazooka until it’s too late.  Our 4-3 loss to a Hurricanes team that came into the Rock on a six-game road losing streak in some ways was one of the most troubling of the season.  If Monday’s loss to the Jets didn’t cancel out much of the good the Devils accomplished by going 2-1 on the West Coast, last night surely did.  You’re not a playoff team yourself if you lose two straight games to non-playoff teams at home, it’s just that simple.

And yes Martin Brodeur gave up four goals when he contreversially got his third straight start in a five-day span (over two coasts).  I’m not going to get into that in detail, Derek did a good job in his previous post, except to say people getting on Schnieder for his comments are being way too pious.  He’s got a 1.87 GAA and a .925 save percentage and essentially lost his job due to a very minor injury.  Cory turned in arguably the best Devils goaltending performance of the season against the Kings, and since that point he’s sat three games in a row.  In the parallel universe where Brodeur would actually be benched with those numbers, let’s see if he wouldn’t be just as ticked off if not more so.   People comparing what Cory said yesterday to Marty’s atitude when he was benched are nuts, Marty had an .860 save percentage when it was supposedly ‘Cory’s team now’.  His performance merited a benching!  What else was he going to say at the time?  I understand Marty being the starter now, both goalies have been equally steady and in the case of a tie advantage goes to Marty because of who he is and what he’s done for the Devils.  That does not mean however, that Marty has to get a disproportionate amount of the non back-to-back starts.  Cory literally has not started a game that wasn’t in a back-to-back since October 24.

Not to mention coach Pete DeBoer is being disingenous when he cites the upcoming schedule as proof that both goalies are going to get games.  We’re in the middle of a 9-game in 15-day stretch.  Marty’s already played the first three of those games and he’ll get one game in each of the next two weekends which are both back-to-back games on Friday and Saturday.  The other two non back-to-back games are against Montreal early next week and you know Marty’s getting those.  So essentially a 41-year old Marty’s going to wind up playing seven games in fifteen days with Cory playing two.  How does that make any sense, exactly?!  Even if Marty was clearly playing better it would still be moronic to give him that much of a workload at this stage of his career.  Apparently Pete thinks backup goalies can only play back-to-back games, unless the backup was Brodeur when he got some non back-to-backs earlier in the year when Schnieder had a slight plurality of starts.  There’s absolutely no point in having Marty play 55-60 games if both goalies are playing well.  Especially since you’re ticking off a guy a year and a half away from FA that you hope is going to be the goaltender for the next ten years after Marty finally retires and runs off to the Hall of Fame.

It’s not as if goaltending is Pete’s only questionable decision these days either.  Up front you just knew when Cam Janssen got his two goals and the team won a few games he’d be impossible to dislodge from the lineup in the near future but even as Damien Brunner, Mattias Tedenby and Jacob Josefson all alternate getting scratched and the offense continues to struggle with potential solutions down in Albany, Janssen’s played the last eleven games in a row.  Not only do you have a completely ineffective forward in the lineup when Cam plays, but you also shorten your bench – and during a particularly compressed portion of the schedule – since he seldom plays more than five minutes a night (last night his icetime was up to 6:39, mostly because of an extended shift where the fourth line got caught on the ice for a minute then iced the puck, causing DeBoer to use a second-period timeout).  It’s not even as if Cam’s physicality has been a big factor either, he’s had one fight since returning.  It’s pretty sad when on a line of Tedenby-Josefson-Janssen when Tedenby’s the most talented one offensively, considering how little he’s done.

While DeBoer has found one line that works in Zubrus-Zajac-Jagr, the other three lines look like they’ve never seen each other before that night’s game.  Putting Patrik Elias with Steve Bernier is another highly questionable decision.  Especially while Elias continues to struggle in his return from back spasms and Bernier plays at a fourth-line level rather than the super third-line level player he was for a time last season.  Elias had two assists in the futile third period rally sure, but he was also a -3 midway through the game and actually deflected Ron Hainsey‘s goal past Marty in the second period.  Michael Ryder‘s a goalscorer but that’s all he does and his one-dimensional talent is wasted with the likes of Andrei Loiktionov.  Loiktionov tries, but he just has not produced offensively after his first ten games last season.  I would have the other three lines be like this for the time being:

Elias-Henrique-Ryder, Carter-Loiktionov-Brunner, Tedenby-Josefson-Bernier

On defense, Pete’s hand was pretty much forced last night due to injuries of varying degrees.  Bryce Salvador, Anton Volchenkov and Adam Larsson were all nowhere to be found last night so Jon Merrill got to play his second straight game, and looked fairly decent in nearly twenty minutes of icetime on a pairing with Peter Harrold.  Still, it was kind of bizarre to see Marek Zidlicky and Eric Gelinas as a pair, when both essentially have the same skillset.  Both are offensive defensemen with booming shots that have defensive hiccups from time to time, and that pairing was not very good at even strength.  Putting them together on the power play is one thing, although even then it’s more or less putting your eggs all in one basket.  Putting them together at even strength does not work though, especially when you have almost no threat of scoring from the blueline aside from those two on the other pairings.  Yes Andy Greene got a goal last night when we were 4-1 down whoopee.  He immediately skated toward the other end of the ice and said a few (likely apologetic) words to Brodeur, no doubt because minutes earlier it was Greene who failed to keep a puck in the zone on the power play and let Patrick Dwyer get past him for a shorthanded goal.  Greene got a second star in spite of that gaffe but d-partner Mark Fayne was far worse and certainly hasn’t made a case for staying in the lineup once the walking wounded return.

Aside from lineup decisions though, the effort level was pretty troubling for the first fifty minutes.  Coming off two straight losses and back squarely below the playoff bubble you’d have figured on a better performance last night.  For the first 47 minutes we were outshot 21-13 with few good chances against a team that just is not very good defensively.  These players and coaches are fooling themselves if they think they got after it last night.  Certainly the Elias and Greene gaffes were telling.  Brodeur looked slow at times and even made a couple of puckhandling snafus that somehow didn’t cost us.  Tedenby-Josefson-Janssen was actually noticeable energy-wise because our ‘2 and 3’ lines did absolutely nothing for the first two periods aside from screw up.  It can’t be that this team got full of themselves on the West Coast, they didn’t even deserve to win the Kings game.  But once again this team is full of underachievers offensively and GM Lou Lamoriello has to figure out why.  Many of the players have changed from last year but the results are depressingly similar.  If it was just one season it’d be hard to blame Pete for players underachieving but now this is two years in a row.  Something’s just fundamentally wrong here when you have Ilya Kovalchuk scoring four even-strength goals last year or Ryder completely dissapearing this year.  It’s telling that one of the few guys Pete can’t screw around with (Jagr – who’s playing in his usual RW spot despite being a lefty stick) is one of the few actually living up to expectations offensively.

Perhaps the only thing good last night for me personally was that I got my team calendar after all, after hearing a tip through the message board grapevine that you could get extras from Guest Services.  So I wound up getting one for me and an extra for my friend, and I was in a good mood before the game.  Even better when I saw my free seats for the night were in a prime location right behind the net.  Too bad I saw three Canes goals scored down there and only Travis Zajac‘s second period marker in front of me.  And I was more dour when the usher over in section 11 wouldn’t let me down there during the first intermission to visit a friend despite the fact my ticket’s just two sections away in 13, and I couldn’t get out of my section in time to see them after the game.  My own usher outside of section 13 never checked tickets after the start of the game.

And yes the stands were full last night, but calling that game a sellout is incredibly disingenous when they literally had thousands of voucher seats that were only filled because of a canned foods donation at the Kings game where you got a voucher code for this game just by donating five canned goods (less than a $10 cost for me).  If those are going to count towards the attendance why didn’t the Monday giveaway seats count as well, or the other various comp giveaways they’ve had this season?  I was under the impression this ownership group didn’t fudge the numbers but I guess that’s wrong too.  In their mission to take all of the fun out of the arena, they even ended Earl’s Dance Party – one usher led a ton of the other ushers in doing a dance routine during a stoppage of play.  For some reason this ownership either feels like they have a huge STH waiting list based on increasing STH’s the last few years, or they systematically want to clear out the rowdy element and make it more ‘family-friendly’, at the expense of any kind of arena atmosphere.  If you compare the arena a couple years ago to it now, there is no comparison and I’m talking about 2010 when we had a futile second-half run there was still more juice in the building than there is now.

On a day where we think of all we have to give thanks for, right now my sports teams (Devils, Jets, Mets) ain’t among them.